Sectarian Blood Bath Drenches Baghdad

Over 100 people were killed in a three-day stretch. A N.Y. Times reporter writes, “Militias now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq.”

N.Y. Times:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 11 — More than 50 people were killed in Baghdad on Tuesday in violence that included a double suicide bombing near busy entrances to the fortified Green Zone, scattered shootings, mortar attacks, a series of car bombs and the ambush of a bus with Shiite mourners returning from a burial.

Tuesday’s killings, many of them apparently carried out with sectarian vengeance, raised the three-day death toll in the capital alone to well over 100, magnified the daunting challenges facing the new government and deepened a sense of dread among Iraqis.

Many of the attacks, particularly those in neighborhoods primarily populated by one religious group or another, bore the hallmarks of sectarian militias, both Sunni Arab and Shiite. Militias now appear to be dictating the ebb and flow of life in Iraq, and have left the new government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and his American counterparts scrambling to come up with a military and political strategy to combat them.

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